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Posts Tagged ‘Publishers’

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Limited

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Fiction print books conform to a limited set of word count brackets, and hence, page count, that have evolved as a result of financial limitations – namely the perceived value of a title in a specific genre, and the cost to print, bind and distribute each book. Most commercial fiction tends to float around the 300-page mark; readers of erotic fiction prefer shorter books (and more variety in their reading) and prefer to buy more, cheaper books; fans of the more dwarves-elves-and-dragons-type fantasy demand huge page counts, and are prepared to pay more. These are generalisations, but you can check the submission guidelines of any publisher to see that most ask for work within genre-specific limits.

In the middle ground of page counts, it’s a case of retail price versus reader expectation, but at the extremes of the range, it’s about the physics of printing. A 3000-word short can’t be bound with a flat spine, as there’s not enough depth of paper to glue the spine onto, and using an effectively flat jacket – as with most weekly magazines – looks cheap and devalues the product. A 200,000-word book can theoretically be bound, but it’ll break its spine the first time you open it.

My point is that the nature of printing has dictated page count. Until now.

eBooks increase in size at a very small rate as word count increases. A quick look at my book on Amazon reveals a file size of 488KB at 105,000 words with a to-spec, 221 KB  cover image and no other graphics. If I’d written 210,000 words, it’d be about 750 KB. A million? Just shy of 3 Meg. Hardly big numbers, given that a song from iTunes comes in about 10 Meg, and we throw album-fulls of those onto iPods without thinking twice.

In terms of distribution cost, there’s nothing stopping a writer producing books of a length far in excess of what is currently considered the norm. But why the hell would you?

eBooks are still subject to limitations within the market, and right now, that’s the price you can expect to charge. Text books and event fiction titles from name brand authors appear to be following the existing pricing curves, but publisher promos and self-publishers do seem to have established a new baseline cost for fiction, namely $0.99, or $2.99 if you think you can sell at that price. The curious twist is that that price point appears to be accepted as the fair rate for a title, regardless of how long that title is. With $0.99 as the minimum you can charge for a Kindle book, you can find quality short stories, novellas and novels at that price. At $2.99, you’d struggle to sell a short, but a novella or novel both fit. Beyond $2.99 is the realm of short story collections and full novels, but without a strong reputation and name recognition, you’d probably struggle to make significant sales at that price.

As a new writer publishing his own work, I’m firmly stuck in the $0.99-to-$2.99 camp, which is fine, as I have some distinguished company amongst my independent peers, but with such a limited scope for earnings on a single book, the equation (more books) > (longer books) makes clear business sense. In researching my next project, I’m looking for enough ideas to fill a book of 150 pages max, as what’s the point of writing it longer, when I could spend the time writing another title, which then has its own shot at that $0.99-$2.99 per unit?

Stories need to run their course, so there will always be long books, but I can’t be the only writer thinking this way, and I honestly believe that books are going to get shorter, on average, as a result. That’s fine with me, as I love shorter stories around the 150-200 page mark, but it may come as an unpleasant surprise to those eBook buyers currently sniffing out bargains.

 

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Self Publishing, Rounds Four and Five

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

A literary agent I follow on Twitter posted this link today, in which the author highlights a few of the breakout self-publishing success stories of the last couple of years. It’s a nice piece focussed primarily on Amanda Hocking – nothing I didn’t know, and the comment list at the bottom is comfortingly predictable – but it caught my attention because 1) it’s on the USA Today website, and 2) the agent who tweeted the link has never directly referenced any material discussing self-publishing before.

I’m not calling this a turning point in the self-publishing (r)evolution, as my perspective is not as detailed as it should be right now, but it’s definitely a beat – a notable mark on the line from obscurity to… who knows?

Any artistic movement (and that’s all self-publishing really is – a group of creative people working outside of the accepted norm) needs acceptance from the mainstream in order to achieve any degree of longevity, but this acceptance comes in broad stages, rather than tiny increments, hence the title of this post. The way I see it:

  • Round one was Vanity Publishing. Everybody lost in round one.
  • Round two was the birth of self publishing. Lots of people trying things out and seeing what worked. A few companies saw the opportunity to monetise this uncoordinated creativity, and clear paths to market emerged. I joined the game near the end of this stage, just as things were getting interesting.
  • Round three saw a number of self-publishing authors emerge as names; these people were making money. Real money. The disparity now was between how those successful writers were viewed by their peers (inspirational, affirming, self-serving, you choose) and the mainstream (J.A. who?). Outside of the eReader early adopters and the eWriting cognoscenti, most people still had a pretty low opinion of self-pubbing writers.
  • Round four… well, we’re not quite there yet, but the linked USA Today article suggests, to me, that we’re very, very close. Round four will be the point where mainstream readers will start to give self-published works a chance. These will almost all be eBook readers – given the lack of print copies of most self-published work – and low price will be the primary reason they’ll take a chance on a new writer with no name-publisher backing. This is the point where solid writing, good cover design and careful, thorough eBook conversion and formatting are vital to winning mainstream acceptance, which is still a long way off.
  • Round five is where things could, in my opinion, get nasty.

The biggest threat to self-publishing success is anonymity, and the worst thing anyone with an interest in keeping self publishing off the radar could do is say something to draw attention to it. When no one knows you exist, there is literally no such thing as bad publicity, and the complete lack of commentary from mainstream publishing regarding indie authors has helped to keep self publishing from breaking out.

Now, though, indie authors are out of the margins and across the page. Nobody, no matter how ingrained their stance on indie-vs-mainstream publishing, can argue with Amanda Hocking’s sales numbers, and anyone reading about her in the press is going to see those sales as, at worst, interesting, or at best, validation. Very soon, there is going to come a point where those whose livelihoods depend upon mainstream publishing are forced to defend their place in the publishing food chain, and hence the higher prices of their authors’ books versus indies, and in the absence of positives to argue on their part, their only option will be to point to the negatives – real or perceived – of buying indie.

I’m not saying that anyone’s going to write opinion pieces slamming the production value of indie work, or that negative reviews of celebrated indies’ work will appear in publications that previously wouldn’t touch a self-pubbed book, or that the most successful indies will be offered book deals to show that these “hidden gems” were carelessly overlooked and can now reach new heights of success with the proper backing, while simultaneously removing the authors’ voices from the debate. No, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, because I hope it’s left for the readers to decide for themselves what authors they buy, and what their books mean to them. But this is business, and sometimes people in business have to play rough, so if it happens, I won’t be surprised, and I hope no other self-publishing writer, no matter how successful, is either.

 

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Posted in News, Opinion, Publishing, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Self-ish Publishing

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

I’m a big fan of self-publishing as a movement, and not just because I’m an active participant. Amazon’s recent moves to extend their reach as a content distributor can’t leave anyone in any doubt about their ultimate intentions – to eliminate the publisher from the writer-to-reader chain – but I’m not alarmed by that possibility. I’ve read some of the work of my self-publishing peers, and I know that the quality is out there. Worst case: if traditional publishing houses become marginalised, there will still be quality content for readers to buy.

The key benefit of increased access to self-published work is, in my opinion, the strength of the relationship that can be forged between author and reader. It’s the indie author’s unique selling point, and it has to be respected. In this internet age, if you’re working to build a fan base, and you take a wrong step and alienate a few readers, you’re done.

There is a fine line between DIY author and DIY publisher, and author’s need to be clear about what they’re trying to be. If you want to be a publisher, that’s great – although you’re entering a field with thousands of people who are better at it than you, and you’d better have a unique angle upon which to sell books. If you’re a self-publishing author, you have to maintain your integrity – or at least appear to – as the second you resort to typically publisher-like behaviour, such as release-windowing on key retailer websites in order to concentrate sales and reviews, the trust you’ve built up with your readers is gone.

There’s nothing wrong with being business-minded, but having “indie” status doesn’t excuse activities for which publishing corporations are regularly lambasted. Ask yourself why you chose to self-publish, and answer truthfully, as your readers will spot the lie even if you don’t. A writer with a quality, yet niche or hard-to-categorise product can justify their independence without losing respect; a “me too” publisher probably can’t, and you’ll eventually get found out.

 

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Gutterball

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

A common complaint aimed at self-published books is the lack of quality control, specifically in the proofreading and typesetting. I’ve not read enough self-published books to be able to definitively validate this complaint, but if you look at a page of new releases on Smashwords – any page – you’ll find at least one book with typos in the book description. Not just loose or minimalist grammar, but actual typos. Do you want to bet the purchase price on the quality of the manuscript? Neither do I.

Aim For Quality

Getting a book ready for sale is hard, and formatting for a particular eReader is a big part of that. The KindleGen tools Amazon provide are not intuitive, and it took me a long time to research the process online, learn the tricks and traps, and produce a product I was happy with. Even the Kindle Previewer application missed a bug in my HTML that didn’t show up until I tested it on an actual Kindle. It’s not easy, but I think it’s worth the effort, as the automated conversions available play towards the Kindle’s default formatting, and that doesn’t allow you the control you need to nail the layout. I don’t want first-line indents on the opening paragraph of each episode/scene, but the Kindle, by default, will add them, so I overrode them. The monospaced font is too big compared to the default font, so I manually overrode the font size for a script section, setting it -1 size relative to the current base font (and honouring the users’ right to adjust the size to their taste). Neat formatting touches are another way to add quality to the product – the kind of quality you’d expect from a “traditionally published” eBook. If you want to compete with the mainstream, you have to match the quality of their output. “Good enough” just isn’t, well, good enough.

Accept no Substitutes

I was so happy when I got my Kindle for my birthday; I’d been holding off buying/reading a list of books so I could fill it with content – traditionally published and self-published – and just dive in. In the first week I jumped between collections of short stories, novellas and non-fiction before finally choosing the first novel I woud read. I was about two pages in when I spotted the first typo; nothing major – just a missing opening quote. I shrugged it off and got back into the story. But not for long. A slow-burner, most pages were action/description until people started meeting up about 5% of the way in, so the errors weren’t as prevalent, but by the time the protagonists met and started to talk, I was counting five or six typos. Per page.

Large blocks of text were missing opening quotes, leaving you half way through a line before you realised the speaker had changed, and there were other typos – obvious formatting errors where letters had been replaced. Now, I know I’m not an average reader; I was a bit OCD about typos before I became obsessed about the quality of my own work and trained myself to hunt them down, but this would be distracting for any reader. Me? I was completely kicked out of the story, and didn’t know what the hell was going on. I persevered to 10%, but then called it a day. I was mad. I emailed Amazon support and asked for a refund and for them to scrub the book from my Kindle, and even though I was past the seven-day return window, they agreed. My argument was that the book was not of a saleable standard and that it should be removed from sale until a corrected version was available. They said they’d contacted the relevant party and had passed on my comments.

So, who was the DIY author who’s careless conversion so offended me?

It was…

Wait for it…

Not… an indie.

It was a book from a publishing house. A big publishing house. One of the biggest publishing houses.

And it wasn’t cheap.

Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter

I’m not going to say what the book was, firstly because I have a submission with the publisher in question right now, and secondly because it’s not the author’s fault – they had no part in the conversion – and they don’t deserve to lose any more sales (although, sharp-eyed friends on Goodreads may notice my to-read shelf is missing a book, but let’s keep it a secret between us).

I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. The print version of the book could never go out in this condition, and conversion is surely a case of reworking the final manuscript draft into HTML, so what had gone so wrong in the process? I’ve been working as a professional writer for a long time, and I’ve used most processes involved in getting text onto paper, so it didn’t take long to spot the clues and work it out. Example: on numerous occasions, “ll” was replaced with “U”. Kind of looks the same if you squint, right? Another example: “some_word?” was replaced with “some_wordY“. Again, you can see that the characters are in the same league, if not the same ballpark.

I’ve converted a lot of text, and I know that basic characters – the core alphabet – are never changed unless you overwrite them on purpose. Mathematical symbols, accented characters, even things like double-quotes and em-dashes can easily get nuked across devices, but you’re safe with “ll”. The only way those mistakes made it into the text were from OCR – Optical Character Recognition – the process whereby printed text is scanned into a computer, which then converts the graphical interpretation of the characters into editable text. Usually by guessing, as I’ve yet to see an OCR system that’s even 90% accurate. Yep – somebody mashed that book flat onto a scanner or photocopier and scanned every page into a computer. You know how else I know? The character substitutions aren’t consistent; it only happens some of the time. This, in addition to the fact that it was opening – not closing – quotes going missing, is a result of the person scanning the book not being able to get the pages flat due to the spine curve; the more the text curves into the gutter margins, the less accurate the scan, and therefore the OCR.

So what? Maybe this is a perfectly legitimate way to convert a print book to electronic format? Maybe the original digital manuscripts of this (very recent) book were lost? Maybe it’s cheaper to farm out conversion to a third-party using unskilled labour to manually scan-in the books? Maybe I’m just being naïve?

And maybe someone at the publisher should have got it proofread.

The Weakest Link

I’m mad as hell about this, as you can probably tell, given the length of this post. But I’m not mad as a reader/consumer (like I said, I got a refund). I’m mad as a DIY author-publisher. I need eBooks to be a success in order to maintain my distribution platform. Without eBooks, I can’t sell beyond the UK. Hell, beyond Greater Manchester is difficult. Publishers are fighting to maintain revenues on eBooks, while customers are pushing to reduce cover prices. Perceived value is everything in this intangible market; when text is all you’re selling, it has to be correct, even if the story sucks. Anyone selling poorly converted content is undermining that value perception – whether inadvertently or not – and is directly impacting eBook adoption.

So many people point to the self-published books “flooding” the eBook market as the weak link in the business model, but anyone, no matter how well-respected, can step into that role, and the more respected the source, the more damage is done.

 

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Posted in eBooks, Publishing, Typesetting | No Comments »

Why I Don’t Care About Piracy

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

I’m not at the level of sales and exposure where piracy is even an issue, but reading a lot of discussions about eBook piracy this week caused me to consider my position on the subject, and the upshot is that I don’t care. I care about piracy as a consumer, but I want this to be a quick post, so I’m not going to start a rant on that one, but as an author – a content creator – it’s just not an issue for me.

There are many reasons for piracy, from being cheap (actually, the least common I’ve noticed), to frustration with territorial release-windowing, to lack of easy access to content. Usually it’s some combination of the three.

As I released Make a Move myself, there is no release-windowing, and I’ve made sure it’s as widely available as possible. So that just leaves the prices tag. $2.99/£2.20 is the kind of price no one can argue with; if you think that’s too much, you’re not going to buy it at any cost. So I’m confident I’ve done everything I can do to make my book available and affordable.

I can see why publishers are worried though. I believe that the extent of piracy is directly proportional to your cover price or, more accurately, perceived value. As a reader, I hope they deal with the issue in a more mature way than the film distributers have (guys, you do realise that the only people forced to sit through your “don’t pirate films” stings are the people who paid for the DVD, right?) but they’re against the clock; the longer they wait in making books easily available on all platforms, the more chance they’ll alienate customers and devalue their offering once it is available.

 

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Conflict in the Comfort Zone

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

I’m conflicted.

A couple of weeks back, I started wondering if I should start submitting Make a Move to publishers again. It was never my intention to stop; I decided to put the book out myself to have some fun while waiting for responses, but the process has taken so much of my time that the submissions have fallen by the way. Then a couple of people independently asked about my submission status, and that confirmed that I needed to give it more brain time.

The problem is, I like where I am right now. Not in a “indie ’till I die!” kind of way, but I like the creative freedom that I have. I’m not a writer who worships the process; writing has always been hard for me, and I have to force myself in front of the computer most days. What I do love is how the stories and characters make me feel – how they make my readers feel. I love ideas – how they collide and coalesce into something amazing. Books let me capture these experiences and share them, but they’re not the only way.

Right now, I’m working on a script for an indie film – nothing major, just a 10-minute short – that features a band. I’m also writing/playing/recording the music for the soundtrack. Thinking about the roll-call of musicians in the fictional band, I realised that the soundtrack would need to feature the instruments they play (I have a keyboard player, there need to be keys/synths in the music). The reverse is also true; I can’t have characters playing instruments that I (or the multi-talented @theanonwonder and @jooleemarie) can’t play, as we wanted to do the music ourselves, without bringing anyone else in. I love that relationship between the reality of the music and the fiction of the film – it gives me the restrictions I need to produce my best written and musical work. The situation transcends story.

I love working this way. I fires me up. I have the best job in the world. I’m just not getting paid for it…

But would an advance on Make a Move change anything? I’d be contractually compelled to write the second season of the book, instead of being able to rely on the understanding of my readers while I get the film done. And I’d have more money, but not enough to give up my day job, which I like. I’d have print distribution, which would get my books out to more readers, but unless the goal is financial reward, more readers isn’t a goal in itself. Sales of the book are far from stellar, but I know the best way to drive more sales is to get the second book written and published, which I can currently do at my own pace.

I think the main reason I still want a book deal is that I love the publishing industry. Yes, I said it. Even though I find their output largely unreadable, and I’ve often said bad things about the way they operate and the mistakes they’re (in my opinion) still making, I love the concept of the institution of publishing. I guess it’s the same way people still see a need for the royal family; they’re a flawed institution, but they’re important just because they are. And as I love publishing, I feel like I should play my part in the big machine, even if I’m not convinced it’s the best path for my career as a writer, or for Make a Move.

Like I said, I’m conflicted.

 

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Posted in Music, Opinion, Submissions, Writing | 2 Comments »

The Face of Publishing?

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Within the context of a digital distribution model, it’s hard for readers to see the value a publisher adds to the process of getting a book from an author to market, which explains, to some extent, the reading public’s reticence to swallow the current baseline of new-release eBook prices. I can’t say I blame them. Publishing’s problem is the same as most creative arts; the value-add comes from intellectual property rather than raw materials. There’s nothing to show in return for their cut of the cover price.

For, um, ever… publishers have maintained this image – a faceless institution, it’s inner workings only revealed in aspirational sit-rom-coms from the US whose leads need a “serious” profession – and it’s mostly been a successful position to take. Now, though, I think it’s holding them back from evolving into the new age of publishing. In a global market in which customer loyalty is closely tied to brand, publishers have no tangible entity upon which to build a brand. Their product is branded based on the author name on the cover or the characters within, and their employees – the editors, typesetters, salesmen, marketers, designers, etc. that represent the true worth of the company – are unseen. Could you name a single editor working for one of the big six? Could someone browsing Amazon with no interest in publishing beyond the books under their mouse pointer?

Could you name a record producer?

I can name a few. They stand just behind the band when it comes to claiming responsibility for the quality of an album. Some would say they deserve more credit than that.

So why don’t book editors – their literary counterparts – command the same respect? No one, no matter how vehemently they champion the self-publishing cause – can deny the benefit of the input of a good editor. But the people working within publishing houses, specifically the big six, aren’t good editors; they’re great editors. They’re literary surgeons working at the top of their field. They can make a good book great, and a great book legendary. So who the hell are they?

As the deluge of content that self-publishing has permitted lands on eShop shelves, people are looking for curation to filter that flow. Crowd-sourced filtering will be the primary mechanism (recommendations and reviews) but there’s still a need for champions – people to identify and promote good writing. I’m not talking about tastemakers (oh, how I hate that term); I’m talking about authoritative voices. People whose opinion is established, tested and trusted. That’s the kind of value you can hang a brand on.

Yet the publishing houses still seem reluctant to open their doors – just a crack – to show us the inhabitants and workings of the chocolate factory. As marketing budgets for new books shrink, the money available to market the parent company seems tighter still.

Or is the publishing industry hiding its stars on purpose? If an editor could make an eBook a hit by offering their patronage, and a mega hit by working with a vetted, paying author directly, what’s left for a publisher to do that a freelance cover designer couldn’t?

With the need for a publisher already being questioned by many authors, what use for them would an independent, respected, branded editor with an impressive cv and an overflowing list of potential clients choose?

 

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Posted in Opinion | 6 Comments »

A Little Piece of History Repeating

Monday, May 31st, 2010

A sixteenth-century stately home is the last place I was expecting to be impressed by new technology, especially after I had my first play with an iPad at the Apple Store on Friday, and was thoroughly underwhelmed, so I hope you can forgive my inflated sense of irony after a weekend of contradictions.

Lyme Park, in Cheshire, is home to a book from the fifteenth century – the Lyme Caxton Missal – an instruction manual for clergymen. It was the first English book to be printed in two colours – a technique beyond English printers of the time, resulting in the printing being outsourced to Paris where the knowledge resided to achieve this feat of advance printing technology. The two colours (red and black) were used to convey the content of what the preacher should say (black) interspersed with instructions as to what he should do (red), which means that the technique had a useful purpose and wasn’t just for show.

The book’s available to view in the house’s library, but it’s under a lot of glass, so its entertainment value is limited. In order to allow people to fully explore the book, the National Trust have installed three computer screens in the library, which are effectively eBook readers. They’re not like any eBook reader currently being touted as the end of the printed word though – these things are cool. The displays are touchscreens – 17″-19″ at a guess – and the application is completely bespoke. The page-turning animation is as smooth as I’ve seen, and the functionality to zoom and navigate is both intuitive and useful. The core text is in Latin, and the option is available to pop-up a translation, or have an audio file play a reading back through attached headphones. All of the added functionality really served a purpose, and the experience was immersive; something more than just reading a book.

I chatted with the attendant in the room, and he commented that he appreciated the irony of reading a 500-year-old book on something so cutting edge, but it was something else he said that piqued my irony gland. He mentioned that the church at the time the book was printed feared the advent of mass-printing, as lower costs and increased availability would allow books into the hands of the peasant class, and subsequent education would make them less amenable to control. I’m not comparing that situation with the current watershed in the move from eBooks as a niche format to something gaining mass-market acceptance, but it does highlight the fact that the idea of restricting development of a technology, or availability of a resource, due to the needs/wants of a controlling elite isn’t a new one.

I’m not trying to get political, or suggest that the publishing houses aren’t acting in everyone’s best interests as they work to find a sustainable business model in the advent of widespread electronic distribution of books. I’m not even sure I have a point to make. My reason for writing is simply this: as I stood, surrounded by some of the oldest books in history, exploring a truly impressive piece of content-presentation software, I realised that the current impasse in the move to reasonably priced, non-release-windowed eBooks is just details. The content of those books – the art, inspiration and creativity – is going to find a way to reach its audience regardless of how hard the gatekeepers fight to hold it back. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, and it’s probably not going to happen soon, but it is eventually going to happen. And everything between now and then will just be history.

 

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Posted in eBooks, Opinion | No Comments »

I Smash Pads

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

I was disappointed when Apple released the iPad. Not because it sucks in any way, but because I was hoping for a new idea – something that hadn’t been done before. Functionally and physically, the iPad is just a large iPod Touch; there’s nothing new about it – it’s just more of something we could already buy. I wanted it to do something mind-blowing, something that would create or revolutionise a market. Like I said, I was disappointed.

One area I thought Apple might explore, given their history of placing pro-level creative tools into the hands of amateurs, is publishing. Maybe adding an iPublish app to the iLife suite that would allow you to upload magazine layouts or text from their Pages app to create online magazines or eBooks for sale from their online store. Maybe iPublish would let you take the podcast you could already create in Garageband and upload it to the iTunes Music Store. I’m just thinking out loud here, like I was back then, but that’s the kind of market shift I was hoping for. There’s still time for them to do this – the iLife suite is overdue for an update, and could be released soon after the iPad with a new twist to offer, but it’s not looking likely.

Then, two days ago, I realised that Apple had actually delivered that market shift; they signed a distribution deal with Smashwords. I know that Amazon have allowed writers to publish directly on the Kindle store for a while, but you need a US bank account to do it, which shuts out a lot of people. Apple have removed the last obstacles to any writer reaching their readers. By signing a deal with an independent distributor of independently published books, Apple have removed all need for publishers and agents. Notice that I said need, not want; there’s every chance the iBook store will devolve into the same morasse as the App Store, so there’s still a strong argument for the consistent “quality” that the traditional publishing machine can deliver, but as long as I can buy a title of the quality of Doom Resurrection in the App Store, there’s hope for its literary neighbour.

This isn’t “the death of traditional publishing”, but something big did just happen. Where we all go from here is anyone’s guess; I’m sure that Apple like to think they know, but they can’t predict what readers are going to choose any more than I can. And Smashwords aren’t predicting anything; they’re just enabling the rest of us.

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Making a Global Move

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

So, if I’m so disappointed in eBooks following my attempt to buy one, am I still considering publishing Make a Move in an electronic format?

Hell yes.

A Change of Perspective

You don’t have to be your target market to understand it; I get that now. I’m not selling to a group of people like me, who read books to relax and take a couple of weeks, maybe a month, to finish each title. eBook consumers – those driving the developing market – are voracious readers, and they consume books in varied forms. I don’t buy the pro-Kindle argument that you can take many, many books with you on holiday, as I only take one. Admittedly, it’ll be one big-ass book, but still just one. And my iPod. The people who would buy a Kindle probably take an extra bag, just for books.

Another reality I’m now starting to understand is that the US and UK markets for eBooks are completely different. As in, at time of writing, the US has one. I’m a tech writer when not masquerading as a real writer, and I work for a global software house with a lot of educated, technologically minded people. I know one person with an eBook reader, and I’m pretty sure that 90% of the contents are pirated. Add to that the fact that Sony’s reader is the only retailer-supported device available in the UK (the Kindle’s availability is more of a hack than a product launch) and that’s not a market I’m looking to enter. The US, however, is at the peak of the eBook wave. Until now, that 3000-mile-wide stretch of water separating UK writers from the US has been an insurmountable obstacle to the Stateside distribution of self-published books; it just isn’t cost effective. And now it may as well be gone.

What Price Freedom?

There is still a potential barrier in my way, though, and that’s cost. There may be a large market of readers consuming eBooks in the US, but as literate technology fans, they’re going to be intelligent enough to have the same issues with cost as I do, and that’s something I need to work out before I can find a market.

Do you know what the cost of developing Make a Move for electronic distribution is? Zero. I’ve already paid for everything in producing the printed version, so the eBook is free. Literally free. Yes, I have to reformat the text and proof it again for errors I may have introduced in doing so, but that’s just my time, not my money. I think that’s why I’m so hard on publishers who are defending their eBook prices by outlining the development cost of producing the text to the required standard of editing and proofreading. What? Are you going to slip the print books onto the shelves quietly and hope no one notices? And I know that eBook sales are going to eat into print sales to some extent, but how about allowing your business model to evolve with the market, rather than trying to cover phantom losses with padded margins up-front? Your protectionism is only hurting early adopters – the people you need on your side.

So I still need to set a price that I think is fair, and I’m not 100% decided yet. I need to put the research hours in, which is something I can do while I’m preparing the text files for upload.

But Will it Sell?

Who knows? I have been thinking about something that the poet Guy LeCharles Gonzalez first put in my head: the power of niche content. If you walk into the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section of a larger Waterstones store, you’ll usually find a bookshelf of US imports. These are books by “cult” US writers who aren’t in print in the UK. Their books are generally more expensive due to the import overheads.

So let’s flip it around. How many books by UK writers are in print in the US? Most I guess, but still a lot that aren’t. If you liked a writer and their books were available in print, you’d probably buy the book, but if you can’t get those printed books, the eBook version, coupled with an eReader, is just as good. Ubiquity isn’t attractive, whereas niche can be, simply because it’s niche. I think a lot of American’s would love my book; it’s set in a part of Paris most writers ignore, is filled with British humour, has a European flavour, and is broken down into easy-to-digest sections that I think public-transport commuters will love.

I don’t think I’ll find a mass market in the US, but I may find a comfortable niche. And with no setup costs, there’s nothing stopping me trying.

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